RAC Connector

You can use the information and links provided here to know about the RAC Connector and its properties.

Note: This connector is deprecated and will be removed in a future version of IBM® Security Directory Integrator.

"RAC" stands for Remote Agent Controller, however the current name for this technology is Agent Controller.

The Agent Controller is a server that enables client applications to interact with agents under its domain: hthttp://help.eclipse.org/helios/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclipse.tptp.platform.agentcontroller.doc.user%2Fconcepts%2Fac%2Fc_ac_ovr.html

A Generic Log Adapter (GLA) transforms proprietary log and trace data to the Common Base Event format (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/specification/ws-cbe/). The rationale for a Generic Log Adapter is that reading log files is messy and making parsers for all types of logs is not scalable and one tends to customize anyway. A GLA can act as an agent of an Agent Controller so that clients can monitor remote application logs.

More information about Agent Controller and Generic Log Adapter can be found on http://www.eclipse.org/tptp/home/documents/index.php.

The RAC Connector can read data from and write data to RAC:

In AddOnly mode the RAC Connector publishes Common Base Events through a Logging Agent. In this mode, the RAC Connector uses an instance of the CBE Function Component to help convert the input schema attributes into a single Common Base Event object.
It registers as an agent within the local Agent Controller and sends it the Common Base Event objects, which it receives from the AssemblyLine.

The RAC Connector does not require the local Agent Controller to be running at the time it is initializing. As soon as the local Agent Controller is launched, the Logging Agent is registered and gets ready to be monitored by clients.

The important point is that the Connector will not report an error if the local Agent Controller is not active.

The Connector will not complain even if there is no Agent Controller installation on the local machine. Of course, no Logging Agent will be registered then.
In Iterator mode the RAC Connector acts as a client of a remote Logging Agent.
As such, it contacts the Agent Controller on the remote machine, obtains a handle to a certain Logging Agent and starts receiving log data in the form of Common Base Event objects.

If the remote Agent Controller goes down the Connector hangs waiting for a response from the Agent Controller (this is due to the current client library realization). – thus any reconnect logic cannot be used.

The Connector uses an internal queue to store the incoming Common Base Events (CBEs). As a result the Connector can keep fetching CBEs even after the Agent Controller has gone down because the queue could still have events in it. Due to restrictions caused by the Agent Controller client library, the Connector can not process Common Base Event objects, which when serialized as XML are larger than 8Kb. If a data portion larger than 8Kb arrives, the Connector will not process any more events and will wait until the remote Logging Agent dies. This is a limitation of the client library implementation.

On termination, the Connector detaches from the remote agent. If this procedure is skipped for some reason (for example the JVM is killed), no other client will be able to monitor the agent. Moreover, the agent will still think that it is being monitored.

For example, if one runs the Connector from the Config Editor and manually stops the AssemblyLine, the Connector will not have a chance to detach from the Logging Agent. So if the Connector is run again, it will not receive any data from the agent, because the Agent Controller (and the agent) thinks that the agent is already being monitored.

Only one client can monitor a Logging Agent at a given time, so no two RAC Connectors in Iterator mode should be pointed at the same agent at the same time.